Friday, October 27, 2017

Tibco Now 2017

This year Tibco split it's well attended conference with three regional conferences. The Asia version was in Spring in Sinapore, the Euro version in Berlin and the US version in San Diego. This time there was a test on the progress of their vision in terms of digital journeys and Tibco plans to help our shared customers. Aragon named Tibco as a leader in the Digital Business Platform Technical Spectrum. For a free copy of the report click here

Tibco has traditionally had a portfolio of strong and visionary products and has had a sweet spots in connecting/integrating and business intelligence. While these themes were still Strong there were some new themes that are emerging. The integration (interconnect everything) and the business intelligence (augment intelligence) are still a driver, but with new scopes and levels of intelligence. The most impressive case studies were around BI (Jet Blue and the Mercedes Racing Team). There were some case studies around cloud conversions, but they are still in progress. The theme of distributed intelligence (smarts on the edge) was new to me. Discussions around customer journeys leveraging a more intelligent customer experience was boiling under the surface.

While the underlying themes were still there, the management team believes that digital will change things. In fact they pointed to survey based conclusions to stay data driven showing the revenue, profit and stock value gaps without digital.

Edge Presence and Intelligence:

With an augmented approach to leveraging Flogo, Tibco will be leveraging it's intelligence even at the chip level. The case for complexity of connections requires decisions at the point of event detection was a common theme. To that end Tibco has proof points of having Statisica (connected data science platform) and Google Tensor Flow (AI) operating at the lowest capacity chip level with a tiny footprint. Intelligence at the edge is for real, now case studies have to emerge leveraging the Tibco approach. Partnerships with Amazon and the leverage of Lamda looks a sure thing. As Tibco starts working with Microsoft, watch for more options.

Skunk Work Teases:

Tibco had some hints in the presentations and some demos on the floor that pointed to some promising emerging technologies. I was very impressed by Tibco graph data base and I saw a NLP approach to leveraging the nodes on this ontological based data base for intelligence that emerges and remembers context as the query turns it's attention to new things. I also heard rumors of partnerships with big players leveraging distributed smarts.Bottom Line:

Tibco sees the opportunity with digital and will make the right investments to help existing clients while attracting new one. Tibco will lead with their strengths in integration and intelligence, but they are more than a two trick pony now.

There was no risk to naming them a Digital Business Platform leader. Now will they continue to move their customer base along. We all will be watching